Code as such

A review of 'Dragon Logic'

The poetry of Stephanie Strickland demonstrates a poetic intelligence that captures not only the lyrical moment in algorithms but also the pervasive quietness of scientific vocabularies. Her work has, thus far, touched on the systems of distributed knowledge — the variegated institutions of knowing, including the natural and virtual geographies into which we embed our cultural memories; the disciplines of mathematics, physics, and astronomy; visual media; and the technologies of language. Dragon Logic is, however, her boldest gesture to date towards the extreme limits of the known universe, one that significantly broadens the limited perception of our ecology to include the virtual interfaces, imagined presences, and online architectures where you cannot “take your own movement for granted” (6).

I am taken in by poetry that denies the reader certain actualities, overt explanations of how imaginations must function in a digital world where our soft analogue bodies appear to recede. The tendency to over-fetishize scientific vocabularies erases the possibilities of the poetic form to explore the momentary warping when such disciplines attempt to explicate the precisions of the abstracted world through natural languages. Dragon Logic, however, resists the over-privileging of abstracted knowledge by interrogating its fantastic predilections for feeling. The book’s structure mirrors an Incan quipu by knotting multifarious knowledge-forms in a way that

Divided, then, into six sections — “e-Dragons,” “Sea Dragons,” “Dragon Maps,” “Alive Inside the Dragons,” “°Codemakers,” and “Afterword” — this collection presents to the reader an imagined cartography that recalls the mythic inscriptions of medieval maps, “here be dragons” (74) — or, more precisely, HC SVNT DRACONES — that denote the limits of our known world and the dangerous, exotic, and uncharted territories that lie outside human knowledge. Such imagined artifacts — and there only two instances of this phrase on extant maps, both of which date from the post-Columbus period[1] — hark back to an era when an understanding of the Earth’s geography was still amorphous. Yet arguably, twenty-first-century spaces remain equally flexible and strange as the perceived threshold between virtual ecologies and the ‘real world’ begins to overlap. Reading Dragon Logic is thus a pleasurable disorientation of what it means not just to know but to read in a confusing social world in which the infinite digital expanse, leaking into material ecosystems, complicates conventional modes of literacy and knowledge.

I have grappled with using a normative mode of reading to respond to a poetry collection that simply resists settled definitions. Yet the only appropriate response is perhaps a personal one. In this case, I offer a speculative ludic reading that treats this book as hypertextual artifact, to open it at any point, at any page, and to read the text without expectation but with an eye for its potentialities, as one does when one logs onto the World Wide Web. Such a non-normative reading underscores the fluid lyricism of Dragon Logic, its openness of form, its circularity, its intrepid and at times concrete visual presentations, and its playful linguistic richness that dissects the inner life of language. Indeed, this collection takes the reader on a hunt for “the mythical, the chimerical, and the purely hypothetical” dragon (49) along the multifarious pathways that lead to and from a comprehensive “wordhoard treasure” (74) of real and mythic knowledges. What exactly this dragon is, and what form it might take, is perhaps moot. It is the quest for this cryptozoological creature — a journey toward possible expression — that drives the poetic thesis.

Dragon Logic thus performs a poetic voyage of rediscovery of the lacunae between so-called finite knowledges and the terror of mystery to cultivate a grappling of meaning that our twenty-first-century immersion into virtual geographies has sharply foregrounded. Cyberspace in this collection emerges from a dark architecture in which myth and imagination confront and subvert the systems of preconfigured pathways, algorithms, and preexistent sign systems that dovetail into the knowledge systems of exactitude and precision. To this end, this collection interrogates hard quantitative sciences (such as the fields of computing, physics, and mathematics); professional sciences such as architecture; and the indigenous systems of knowledge that include Celtic, Mayan, and Greek mythology, and Māori whakataukī (proverbs). The title Dragon Logic names at once this collusion of digital protocols, scientific inquiry, and technologies of computing with traditional knowledge databases. This concatenation of knowledge systems underscores the struggle for, and translation of, meaning in our contemporary social world. Indeed, the title’s allusion to the speech-to-text software Dragon Dictate or Dragon NaturallySpeaking should not be ignored; the poem as dictation software suggests procedural execution, a knotting of human vocality with the cool utterances of our machines. In these mediations of technological imagination, language becomes filtered through ecosystems of forms, disciplines, fields of knowing, and digital mechanisms. Strickland’s poetic form is transformed into a sensory computer that simultaneously measures and erodes communication. Dragon Logic explores our negligent metaphorical use of words as uncontested markers of knowing. Indeed, the collection raises urgent questions about the authority of our western systems of knowledge, and their legitimating orthodoxies, to rest on a horrifying possibility: how do we really know what we know?

When I open the book randomly, then, I turn surprisingly not to a poem but to an untitled email from Internet artist and poet Alan Sondheim:

Infinitely thin projective slice of difficult equation. The compression comes to grip[s] with it. There may be shadows of the future, I don’t know … coordinates are always variable. When the space moves, the[y] become ill. Don’t they?

Dragon Logic explodes with these moments of appropriated, recycled, polyvocal textuality — what Brian Reed has termed as “redirected language”[2] — that in the information age underlie a system of pointing to prior contexts of meaning. Here, the hypertextual sediments — the URLs that direct the reader along a preconfigured highway to Alan Sondheim’s movie files — lose their original functionality in the materiality of the book. Rendered now passive on the page, they nonetheless continue to speak to their digital operations, their mechanisms that move web users to another ‘page.’ Typing these URLs, however, into the address bar of my browser reveals that these markers are broken links, inoperative like their counterparts on the material page. The “coordinates” of spaces indeed “are always variable.” Strickland demonstrates the inherently instabilities of language as technologies mediate and leave their textual residue on linguistic systems. And it may seem obvious to state that the text, in both print and digital networks, never retains its stable presence. But I am particularly struck by the collaborative and quasi-conversational nature of this collection that points to our social networked conditions. Sondheim’s email underscores the impossible compression of contemporary writing into singular voices and subject positions, and so embraces instead the inevitable variabilities of network culture.

As I open the book again, I come to the poem “Rara Avis.” Underneath the title is a short paratextual note, “telepresence installation by Eduardo Kac°”:

not the old vicarial Holy Communionnor the older surgery pregnancy sexinstead another newer way to enter each other to share the same ( telematic ) co-ordinatesto share via circuitry and hardware ( these vary ) surveillance an ambience physical robots and avatarswander (10)

As the note suggests, the poem refers to an art installation by poet and multimodal artist Eduardo Kac. The installation “Rara Avis” (1996) enabled participants, remotely and locally, to experience an aviary from the perspective of a telerobotic macaw.[3] Telepresence describes emergent technologies that allow a person to participate or mediate a location remotely. Such machines augment not only our soft bodies but also our subjectivities to foreground posthuman and nonhuman points of view. In this opening sequence, Strickland yokes together the regimes of the physical — surgery, pregnancy, and sex — that suggest the ways that we enter multiple materialities and manipulate the thresholds of our epidermal surfaces. Far from losing sight of the material body, and its spiritual aura, in the bodies of information, Strickland recuperates the body’s physical ambience in virtual spaces. Subjectivities multiply, proliferate, and disperse: our “composite unfragmented” selves are “neither // all-here not all-there sliding in // shifts” (10).

The degree symbol (°) is also worth noting here, since it illustrates the multiple sign-systems operating in this collection. This typographical mark represents degrees of arc (in geographic coordinate systems), hours, temperatures, or the diminished quality in musical harmony. In Dragon Logic, the mark is also an indexical signifier that transports the reader to satellite information in the back matter. In this sense, the (°) not only articulates the degrees of presence, boundaries, and borders that call out to the surrounding space — the multiple dimensions of information — but also the “°Codemakers”: the configurational and fictional, the human and the divine characters who have been responsible for knowledge production.

In one final gesture, I turn to the poem “Line spears nets knots have knots.” Several lines especially stand out:

Each successive line points to the ever-changing states of the linguistic ecology with increasing lyrical playfulness. This poem appears to be drawn from an essay by Sally Jane Norman, “Kupenga, Knots, Have Knots,” in which she argues that

In Maori [sic] culture (as in many cultures with strongly articulated transmission protocols), fear of the dissolution of treasured knowledge through its wholesale delivery to the world at large is in some cases leading to quiet death of that knowledge, borne to the grave for want of a sufficiently comprehensive human relay, a vital new carrier.[4]

Strickland’s performative remediation of this language seems suspicious of potential loss and breakdown of communication, and suggests instead that acts of dissolution and the errors of the “vital connections” nonetheless refresh the opportunities for the formation of new word-hoards. The intertwinedness of language, and the natural redundancies of information flows, do not beget loss in errors of transmission, but, rather, offer new linguistic relations, new relays, and recursive exchanges in cultural regeneration.

It is fair to say that Dragon Logic enunciates the pleasure of the loud ambiguities, the moments of almost-knowing, the tip-of-the-tongues, the perhapses, and the abstractions that navigate a concrete horizon of scientific exactitude. Strickland has designed a lyrical 3-D sculpture where “every junction is a number a corner a vertex” (28). Every coordinate is simultaneously a beginning, middle, and ending.

I want more than a box with door on it, or a minimized surface; although so many would be glad for it, content to lose

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